Programming, Art, Politics

Deep dreaming profile pics

In this blog post, we are going to adapt deepdream to “not dream too much” in some areas and thus create inceptionist profile pics.

Deep dreaming or Inceptionism is a funny by-product of deep-learning for computer vision. Some developers at Google recently invented the technique to visualize what’s going on inside a deep neural net. By forcing the net to iteratively adapt the input data to its own expectations, the input image is changed in strange and surrealist ways.

The resulting “dreams” have been all over the media, and are certainly exciting. But you can’t use the method that easily for creating profile pics, as after some iterations the original image will be entirely gone. To prevent this, we can adapt the code so that it never touches some parts of the image.

We can now customize the make_step function such that the specified ellipse mask is excluded from the updates. We also set the scale coefficient to 0, in order to avoid scaling our mask. However, this could be implemented easily.